Abstract
A fundamental theoretical tension exists between the role of the hippocampus in generalizing across a set of related episodes, and in supporting memory for individual episodes. Whilst the former requires an appreciation of the commonalities across episodes, the latter emphasizes the representation of the specifics of individual experiences. We developed a novel version of the hippocampal-dependent paired associate inference (PAI) paradigm, which afforded us the unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between episodic memory and generalization in parallel. Across four experiments, we provide surprising evidence that the overlap between object pairs in the PAI paradigm results in a marked loss of episodic memory. Critically, however, we demonstrate that superior generalization ability was associated with stronger episodic memory. Through computational simulations we show that this striking profile of behavioral findings is best accounted for by a mechanism by which generalization occurs at the point of retrieval, through the recombination of related episodes on the fly. Taken together, our study offers new insights into the intricate relationship between episodic memory and generalization, and constrains theories of the mechanisms by which the hippocampus supports generalization.
Highlights
The hippocampus is widely accepted to play a critical role in episodic memory, the capacity to remember individual experiences from the past[1,2]
For all experiments we report the results in a Bayesian statistical framework
A similar concept in null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is represented by confidence interval (CI), this does not describe a probability distribution over parameters values, but merely defines two end points, which are based on the hidden intentions of the experimenter and not on prior knowledge[32,33]
Summary
The hippocampus is widely accepted to play a critical role in episodic memory, the capacity to remember individual experiences from the past (e.g. where one parked the car on a given day)[1,2]. Recent evidence suggests that the hippocampus plays an important role across species in experimental paradigms where successful performance depends on exploiting the commonalities present across multiple related experiences[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] These findings provoke fundamental questions about the nature of hippocampal representations, and how putative mechanisms by which the hippocampus might support generalization in such scenarios fits with its well established role in episodic memory. We conducted several studies to explore the effects of different experimental conditions – for example, whether participants knew during the study phase of the task that their ability to generalize would subsequently be tested – on the relationship between episodic memory and generalization
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